ｆＩｘＩｎＧ ｔＥｄ

Continuiation of: 𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝐸𝒶𝓈𝓎 𝒪𝓃𝑒𝓈

"He has a plan"

Jem was not right. She knew nothing was right. She knew this because her fucked in the head, Ted had just taken over control of the stupidly huge hauler she had traded for one of her "candy ships".

It's best to rewind just a bit

Frantic does not begin to describe our intrepid Jemsase. She found "her one", something that was supposed to have been "bred out of her". They struck down the sexuality of the younger ones, especially the transplanted ones on Venus like Jemsase. She wasn't supposed to have a single urge, let alone a desire to just take the fuck off out of spite during a calm window.

They had all been so exceptionally bred that nobody was even ready for someone like Jemsase to just say "fuck a bunch of this" and leave after a few hundred years of advanced schooling. Her brain was a massive sponge, as one of the few living examples of a DAL/REC(Our Universe) hybrid. She was also one of the few that could travel seemlessly between DAL and REC, so a huge military asset.

They wanted her to become a grand military specialist in our Universe. She wanted a guy named Ted from Seattle. She wanted burgers from Shacks and cars from Musk. She ADORED the Earth societies she was supposed to be exploiting. She had her coffee card punched daily.

So,

All of this, passing through her head...

It clicked. To her mind, she hadn't actualy done anything wrong yet. They had no RIGHT to attack her. Still...

She was damn sure planning to be a very bad girl indeed. So, it did not matter how or why the DAL flagships were currently pursuing her and literally attempting to make almost impossible shots on her ship while in travelspace. What mattered was how she was going to deal with it. Oh, and what she really needed to figure out was why the fuck TED was currently piloting a ship when he couldn't operate a manual transmission. She literally taught him how to use a clutch in a car because he was being so adorable and sheepish in admitting he had no idea what he was doing.

Jem had it bad

If there was a type of guy that reduced Jem to a puddle of worthlessness, it was Ted. Ted would try so hard, his sexy bangs would get in his eyes, and he'd look absolutely adorable while swiping at his hair, and failing miserably at absolutely everything. Everything that didn't involve Ted just being adorable. So it was beyond strange that a man literally designed to fail while being adorable, and needing the help of a strong man or woman to help him, would be saying...

"We are going to shoot for right in between them." while pointing at a binary pair of neutron stars.

See, that's not a very Ted thing to be saying. So Jem asked for clarification.

"WHAT? Are you fucking insane?" said Jem. And she kinda meant it. She understood the basic goal, but she also understood the insane math involved.

"He told me. You need to trust me. The argument is I shouldn't be able to do even this." said Ted. "So you should just relax and go with this. Clearly this is beyond you."

"Directly between those two rotating neutron stars is a perfectly balanced region of space that's perfectly calm. If we can get you there, you have time to do anything. Forever time."

Jemsase considered this. Right now the issue was they were being chased by temporal cops. So they were already basically fucked. But... if they could somehow do the impossible and get themselves inside the equivalent of a Lagrange Point between orbiting neutron stars, then nobody would be able to get to them.

Why trust Ted?

"The math that should not be possible" is what Ted said. Jem thought she was hallucinating. "You fucked this guy up bad. You need a safe place. DAL already has you tracked. You need to be nowhere." came out of Ted's mouth, but Ted was not saying it.

"Who the fuck are you? Why are you helping?" asked Jem of the entity currently speaking through her found Ted.

"I'm going to help this guy do a mostly impossible maneuver. He's going to reach a safe spot between powerful orbiting singularities." At this point Ted got very quiet and stared at a point in space outside the craft. This was also not ted-like behavior.

The actual feat of math itself was not very impressive to experience. Jem got to feel roughly 400 hours of time on approach to the quiet spot. They had to carefully orbit it on the right elliptical to push through at just the right point on the time corrected 5000 years it really took them to do it.

The thing that had been bothering Jem was who Ted had been acting like.

"Frank?"

"Kinda" said the entity. "You'll understand soon. I have to do a lot of consolidated moves, so putting you somewhere that nobody can bother you so you can fix your Ted matters a lot very soon. In the grand scheme of things. For right now, enjoy peace. I'm sorry things got so complicated. I had an opportunity to correct this now because it had a fast determined ending. You got hurt bad. I had to give you a role."

The "Tedity" stopped talking through Jem's kidnapped, fucked up Ted. Ted slumped to the floor. She wondered about a lot of what had happened. There was no way their ship could not only have navigated the twisted magnetic hell that is the map between two orbiting hypermass objects, but broke through a region of space from the most deadly to calm space, through a barrier that could tear a star apart, let alone a ship. They should be many kinds of dead.

Suddenly Ted was his almost impossible to understand babbling self again. Like he had just been released back to himself while the Entity that had been flying the massive cargo hauler just kinda had something better to do and was no longer around.

Jem got enough presence of mind to look around a little. She noticed that there were these rapidly appearing then disappearing ship signals outside the compressed bubble of spacetime they had somehow managed to occupy. They got to within 1mm of the space between Jem's new ship and the edge of normal spacetime, over and over like some miracle. She realized that they were now looping through a massive expanse of time, that should not in fact be looping. They should have died almost instantly. What Jemsase had learned is that the areas that are calm between orbiting supermasses were death. They should just be instant death. Because even the weakest one should be projecting the entirety of a 30 billion year Universe Shard run in about an Earth year, but they don't loop. You get there, you end with them.

Not This One

While being between the orbiting solar masses. Billions of years were going by. The entire life of the Universe, and DAL had STILL not figured out how to get to them.

This was highly reassuring.

 

Trune Valhard hated his entire life and existence. Imagine being re-awakened just to end someone else. That's it. That's how little you matter. That's the fucking breadth and width of your existence.

That's why he was suddenly awakened, after millions of years... inside REC!!!! (Our Universe, their moniker)...

in some ridiculous attempt to pretend that what they were asking for was even possible.

He was about to become a logic victim of Jemsase

He fucking knew it. This would be his end. That fucking selfish bitch that couldn't just walk the line. He would be asked to hunt down a classmate. Someone he'd love instantly if he was allowed. If central let him. If DAL determined it was an "unmitigated now" and approved.

But at the same time? Trune knew that he was dumb for even following her, or even trying. Trune was simply a killing machine.

The absolute best part of this scenario is that Trune stayed in hyperspace. His body was designed to stay there for what you'd think of as years. Because of general relativity, Jem and Ted had roughly 10,000 years together in the calm space between the orbiting neutron stars to talk about absolutely everything.

Cats do this thing where their tails get huge and fluffy and they arch their backs and bare their fangs. If Jem was a cat, she'd be rocking this look. Trune Valhard just appeared out of thin air. Worse, he was clearly bathed in a molecular field. His favorite weapon. He could simply walk through you and you would no longer exist in our Universe. He erased matter.

Trune could not believe he actually made it through. Suddenly he was beside the bridge console of the.. ahem.. "bigfuck". A name he literally had to put in a log report for DAL. Thanks Jem. Classy girl.

For Jem... she could die now. She had 10,000 years with her Ted. Because they were literally surrounded by an absolutely insane source of energy... I mean... imagine the ultimate Off Grid Living... where you have so much free energy that you can convert it into any matter you'd ever need instantly. After 500 years, Ted had mastered the can of Heiniken. The best part? All of Ted's problems being temporal in nature made them orders of magnitude easier to fix in an isolated pocket of it. Before his brain just could not cope with all the twisted time Jem introduced. Putting Ted in the Sargaso Sea between Neutron stars cured him almost on its own. What Jem thought might take years of work and therapy took weeks.

As Jem braced for death... I mean... she wasn't really putting a lot of effort into it. Ted himself had become quite brilliant over ten millennia. To her mind, Trune hadn't had enough time to mature to where she and Ted had together, so death was imminent.

"He's very hot" said Trune as he turned off his molecular shield. He then literally ripped the module off his REC suit and broke it in half and threw it like a broken chopstick, landing it perfectly near the feet of the currently embracing Jem and Ted. They had been certain they were dying together. Over 10,000 years, Jem had plenty of time to tell Ted everything in her head. Ted had plenty of time to change her terrible taste in music. And she, surprisingly, had gotten to understand why The Pixies and Frank Black were so stunningly amazing. Number 13 was playing when Trune popped into existence 150 feet away in the massive cargo ship. Ted had enough presence of mind to say "Oh, this is getting Stephen King."

So when Trune simply turned his shit off, broke it, and threw it at them like an offering...

No, Jem and Ted were still totally fucked. Trune did not help shit one bit by then saying.

"I've always loved you. They really should have sent anyone else. You are brash and ignorant and terrible. And I love you. I won't change my mind simply because you fuck barbarians. Oh, hi Ted 56732."

"What?" asked Jem, literally clutching Ted harder.

"I like him. You are shallow as fuck so you went after his stats but, that Ted has designed some of the most amazing 100 square foot cargo container housing on Earth. I know. I got so bored heading here. It wasn't immediate for me. I think you have that misconception. It went the other way. In fact, I literally got to observe both of you playing board games for over 400 years because of sheer luck at turning my head at the right moment. Let's be honest. The games with the best special gimmick aren't always the best. Simple is better. You played Clue and Life more than anything."

"So you aren't going to kill us?"

Trune laughed out loud. He suddenly realized that despite their ten thousand years together temporally, they didn't figure out the important thing.

"One of those stars is going to die before the other one. You will then, with me, be ejected at sub-light speed out of this binary system entirely inside a bizarrely protected bubble of what is basically uncertainty. Why in the hell would us lucky special beings hurt each other?"

That's when Jem knew that Trune not only suspected intervention, he knew it had happened.

"The biggest thing to me is, I'm alive." Trune then proceeded to completely destroy his attack shell. More broken chopstick looking modules appeared at the feet of Jem and Ted as Trune carefully and systematically destroyed the most advanced weapon of war ever made. In the end he was completely nude.

Ted whipped up an outfit for him using some of the tech he had made. Suddenly Trune looked like a diminutive Seattle sidewalker repleat with fuzzy hat and frown.